I thought I'd share with you some of the movement related ideas we've been talking about at Epic. Most of these mirror or are based on the proposals we've seen here in this forum.

Our preference is to move back toward the level scale and weapon balance of UT99. At the same time, we want to provide as much as possible the freedom of movement and sense of mastery that UT2K4 movement could provide. We also want to make sure that the movement system is accessible and not overwhelming for new players - we want the community to grow and thrive. For now, we should also decouple our thinking about movement in the much more open and large scale vehicle oriented maps - it's reasonable that we may choose some unique mechanics that work for those environments.

It seems clear that Unreal Tournament will have dodging. I don't think it would be recognizably UT without that mechanic. We should keep the double tap control scheme, but at the same time provide an alternative way to trigger dodging for people that aren't comfortable with the double tap.

We're leaning toward not having double jump in the base movement mechanics, and instead increasing the default jump height.

We're experimenting (as you can see in Nick's prototype) with providing the ability to get up over edges that you couldn't quite reach with your jump. This allows us to decouple how high we let players jump from what geometry it seems like you should be able to clear.

We're experimenting with wall dodge - we like the mechanic, and want to make it work well in more normally scaled levels. We're also thinking about whether we'd allow wall dodges to be chained. If we do, we'd make sure that the vertical velocity of the wall dodge was minimal (or zero), so you wouldn't be able to climb, and would actually still be dropping as you performed them.

Wall running, or possibly dodging along walls, is also an interesting mechanic to explore.

The feeling of weight in movement is a combination of gravity and view adjustments when jumping and landing. This gives us some flexibility in coming up with mechanics that are balanced and at the same time feel good.

I really encourage you guys to keep coming up with movement ideas that go beyond what UT has done in the past. We probably won't incorporate most of them, but they help us all expand our thinking, and a few of them may be the key to creating the perfect movement mechanics for the new Unreal Tournament.

There's a lot more we want to discuss that we've been hearing from you and are getting excited about ourselves, so lets keep this conversation going!